Search This Blog

Let's Read: The Once and Future King (Ch.8)

“He [Wart] was not forced to stay indoors
because of the rain, by his female supervisors, as happens too frequently to
the unhappy children of our generation, but the mere wetness and dreariness in
the open discouraged him from going out. He hated everyone” (73).

More alarming though, check out that piece
of sexist trash—Wart was forced to stay inside due to his female supervisors, the horror! Boys need to be free to splash
around in the rain, dicks out and waving… I can hear White remarking in my
mind’s eye. Darn women, emasculating men by keeping them coped up when they
should be outside doing manly—penis-y—things! (Sorry to keep going back to
genital delusions, it is just so evident in this passage.)

Now, I can understand where White is coming
from; when I was little and my brother and I were babysat by our grandmother,
she would, to out chagrin, keep us pressed inside all day while the wonders of
the great outdoors beckoned. But that was due to many factors concerning danger
as well as health and a personal desire to see us. Not because, as White seems
to be suggesting here, that women are making children unhappy because of
reasons.

But Wart is bored. Apparently, living in a
castle is a tedious affair. True, though, it does sound less like Hogwarts and
more like drafty corridors in an age before penicillin. So it does sound trite.

So to alleviate his boredom, Wart begs
Merlyn to transform him into a bird—a merlin—so that he may spend the night
among the castle’s various hawks and falcons, taking in their culture (or
something). Merlyn eventually agrees but not before commenting on the bird’s
enclosure and life; long story short, the birds formed a kind of Spartan
military enclosure which favors only the high born class (other birds of prey).
These game-birds are trained, in part, through hunger, and it is suggested that
they have not only a deep pride for their home and heritage, what they can remember
of it, anyways, but also that they do not actually understand that they are
prisoners.

It is an odd commentary but not one which
is unwelcome by any means since it is true that many real world military men
and women are trapped into service for similar means (of honor and defending
one’s home, etc. various other rationales which simply don’t apply in the
imperialist metropole). But it is simply odd to see such a commentary spoken
through birds and one which connotes as much sadness as it does—prisoners who
take delight in what they can remember about their life before imprisonment,
form an elitist, classist structure, and who take themselves so seriously, are
in reality, simple animals who are unaware of the shadow-makers in the cave.
Pity.

Moving on!

Merlyn drills into Wart that he must not
under any circumstances stand beside Cully’s enclosure as Cully is not right in
the brains; not only are we going to find some more extrapolations about Cully,
the bird from the first chapter, but it is also tied up in yet more mental
health issues. Yay? I dunno… this is, I think, the third time that mental
health aberrations have been written of so far (the first was that woman from
the first or second chapter and the second was Wat, who bite off Dog Boy’s nose).
The references don’t seem particularly Ableist but it is odd seeing repeated
reference to mental illness.

But, Merlyn transforms Wart into the merlin
bird and then takes him into the enclosure where he is super nervous about
being around his formerly subservient creatures. Disguised now as one of them,
Wart must pass both a series of questions as well as an ordeal in order to
prove his avian mettle.

This whole process isn’t very
interesting—the questions are simply about being a bird and where he comes from
and so on, whereas the ordeal is simply being forced to stand near Cully until
a bell chimes three times. There is a bit of tension to the whole thing, which
I find remarkable since it is just bird games, but it isn’t interesting except
in a worldbuilding sense, of seeing all the hidden spaces of a world.

Before that happens, though, Cully makes
his presence known by loudly muttering to himself.

“’Damned niggers,’ he [Cully] was mumbling.
‘Damned administration. Damned politicians. Damned Bolsheviks. Is this a damned
dagger that I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Damned spot. Now,
Cully, thou hast but one brief hour to live, and then thou must be damned
perpetually” (78).

Cully, what a bigot and reactionary. But
the dialog does sound like that of a mentally ill person, perhaps someone with
late stage Alzheimer’s disease who struggles to remember what exactly is
happening at any given moment (though Cully is also prone to fits of violence,
it seems, so this is perhaps not the case). Usage of the N-word and reference
to Bolsheviks is thought-provoking; the birds’ enclosure is a military-styled
formation, so it is not surprising that the old timers would be
counterrevolutionary (though how birds know about Black people and Russian
communists is beyond me since this is early medieval England).

Then Wart completes his trial, is sworn in,
and the chapter ends after the birds sing their jolly old militarist song.

Popular Posts

Lately, I was browsing around online and found another handy resource for aspiring medievalists.

Enter, Western Michigan University's Medieval Institute!

The site has links to an extensive book shop, scholarly journals, as well as a free download. See below for links.

General listing: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medievalpress/
Index of titles available for purchase: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalpublications/all-titles
The 'Medieval Globe' book(s): http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/ (Click on title(s) for free download)

Okay, that is all for now. Sometime soon I think that I would like to organize all of my resource links so that I, as well as you, have a concrete listing of reliable resources. Until then, we shall have to make due.